Hassabis awarded for protein analysis system
27. September 2022Hassabis awarded for protein analysis system
San Francisco, 9/27/2022
DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and researcher John Jumper have received one of three $3 million Breakthrough Prizes in the life sciences for the development of the AI Lab’s AlphaFold program. The AI system can accurately and rapidly predict the shape of nearly every known protein on Earth. DeepMind has now compiled a freely accessible database of more than 200 million protein structures, including those of animals, plants, bacteria and fungi.
AlphaFold has predicted how proteins fold into their 3D structures based on the sequence of their amino acids. After that, almost every biochemical reaction in the body determines what they do and how effective certain drugs might be, for example.
Hassabis and Jumper designed and built the deep-learning system, which has already been used by more than half a million researchers since an open-source version was released last year.
Other Breakthrough Prizes were awarded in the areas of mathematics and fundamental physics. Each of the five top prizes is worth $3 million. Endowed by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner, the 2021 prizes are described as „the most
lucrative prizes in science“ and are sponsored by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki.
